John Bates
Molly WhiteMany yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
Taggart 
@molly0xfff I believe we can, and I believe this yearning, combined with what we're seeing on the corpo-controlled web, is going to lead to a really interesting "hard fork" of the web in the not-too-distant future.
Anthony, of course@molly0xfff this appeared quicker than I expected!
Bill@molly0xfff That is a really really great article. I really really wish I had pimped #veilid to you when you were asking leading questions. I knew you'd touch on privacy.
Paul McBride@molly0xfff this is a fantastic summary of how the web has changed over the past 20 years. I really enjoyed the metaphors!
Rick O@molly0xfff I used to have to sit down at my computer with intent. I was taking time to go do something online. And it felt more like hunting or exploring. Nowadays it's much more often a passive experience of consumption. Scrolling on my phone hoping something interesting will come to me via one of the few sites a regularly visit. I could still go hunting for the niche stuff, but it's just so easy to scroll a little bit more.
Chris@rickoooooo @molly0xfff what you’re said here really sums it up for me too. If I want to find something new, fun, or interesting I now have to just hope it appears on one of my feeds. There are so few places that curate things like this any more, or make discovery easy.
Webrings, simple websites, the yahoo directory, and blogs like how BoingBoing used to be don’t feel like they are around any more.
@FiniteLooper @molly0xfff I sometimes wonder if I'm just not looking for it because it's easier to scroll. Or maybe I can't remember how I used to find the interesting stuff. I recently discovered tilde.town through Mastodon and that place looks really fun.
Pax_Siciliae@molly0xfff wonderfully written and i feel a beautiful summary of a view on the state of the web.
Christabelifunanya@molly0xfff
Be patient enough to meet Elon musk
https://medium.com/@christabelifunanya12/why-choose-the-name-transcend-3e70ea048042
Be patient enough to meet Elon musk
https://medium.com/@christabelifunanya12/why-choose-the-name-transcend-3e70ea048042
Sky Leite@christabelifunanya12 Wow. I wish I didn't click that.
Stryder Notavi@sky @christabelifunanya12 Definitely a candidate for a mute or block.
Honestly not sure why they thought this content was even relevant to the discussion at hand.
alcinnz@molly0xfff Superb article, thanks!
zoug@molly0xfff thank you for this, loved it.
I do disagree with what you write about paywalls: my current employer uses those, and without subscription income, we'd have to run ads and lean into attention farming, clickbaits etc, stuff that you also call out in your piece. The sad truth is that independent journalism without revenue is impossible, and I think paywalls are the lesser evil here.
Otherwise, great article.
@zoug while i think there is room on the web for a diversity of funding models, i am very concerned about the trend of information becoming less and less available to those who can't afford (often very high) subscription prices
Dmitri ☕️@molly0xfff @zoug I think a good compromise could be pricing exceptions. The best example I can remember is Fetch, which was free for students (verified via .edu emails). I lived on that app for over a decade.
PaulDavisTheFirst@analog_cafe @molly0xfff @zoug over at ardour.org, where we charge for ready-to-run versions of our multiplatform DAW, we set the default price to our best guess at the cost of mid-range meal out for two without alcohol, in the country indicated by the request's IP origin. This currently varies from US$7 to US$56.
The (potential) customer is free to change the price to as low as US$1 if they wish.
Pax Ahimsa GethenI hear you, but I personally would rather prioritize people getting free access to food, housing, and medical care than free subscriptions to publications.
badsynthesis@molly0xfff @zoug I thought about this a couple of years back and began subscribing to a few newspapers.
Someone needs to pay their salaries and I'd rather it's me than the journalists being forced to pander to advertisers or the whim of some sociopathic billionaire.
One tricky part is, there's interesting articles in so many newspapers that I only read once a month or once per quarter.
I haven't considered the relative inflation adjusted cost of a subscription, have they risen a lot? My thought has so far been that in the era of paper newspapers people subscribed to one newspaper and that was it. Now if I wanted to pay for all I want to read it'd be...a lot. Of course, reading all I wanted to read isn't a right.
Agreed, though I always share paywall-free links to my own stories. I wrote my opinion about paywalls and ad blockers a few months back:
(Click the link, not the image preview, to bypass the paywall on this story)
Grant_H@zoug @molly0xfff Have a look at the model of https://dailymaveric.Co.Za
They have subscribers, and no pay wall. And are growing.
May not work everywhere, but it works there.
They have subscribers, and no pay wall. And are growing.
May not work everywhere, but it works there.
CorpomancerI often enjoy wandering the Neocities of today.
Andreas Steinkellner@molly0xfff Spot on analysis of the current state. I fear that this alternative version of the web can (and partially does) still exist, but only inside a niche bubble.
Surprisingly, more and more young people seem to be realizing that they're sitting in a dystopian walled garden - so maybe there is still hope.
@molly0xfff Thanks for making the audio version of your article available, Molly! I appreciate it.
I won't say that the early web was all good. The good vibes I associate with it may have more to do with just youth.
But as someone who poured thousands of hours building a website from scratch and even more time creating content for it, I can't say I'm not pissed about having to compete with the auto-BS while being placed in the same bucket of affiliate/SEO farms by the social discourse. Sigh.
@molly0xfff the one part of this that might be worth exploring - how much of this depends on corporate investment in meatspace infrastructure - i.e. rollout of fiber, readily available broadband, etc. The web is great now w/ 1 gbps fiber, but back then, the web was only as good as a certain point at 1.4 kbps via modem over copper telephone lines…and with corporate, i.e. old school AT&T style - there still is some element of gatekeeping/censureship that is possible
Toni Aittoniemi@molly0xfff Great article!
Toad64@molly0xfff Thanks, really enjoyed reading this! I'm also hopeful that more people will start making their own weird spaces on the web again!
adamrice@molly0xfff Yes to all this.
matthew@molly0xfff I hadn't really thought to pronounce FAQ by fully spelling it out instead of saying "fack" until I heard you say it in the audio version
Greyleader77@molly0xfff
Thank you for this great work!
You might like this... Great new music was released on geocities recently:
https://www.geocities.ws/ccqsk/
Pitchfork review: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cindy-lee-diamond-jubilee/
Arwin@molly0xfff Every so often you find a piece of writing and you wish you had written it.
A piece that grabs hold of thoughts and feelings you had inside you- and opens them up, arranges them beautifully, and lays them out before you in a way you aren’t sure you could. Thank you.
💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱@molly0xfff
"peered in to see what kinds of plants you were growing and what kinds of decorations you were putting up in hopes of selling you something similar later on"
Honestly, I wouldn't mind so much if they could actually deliver on that, but they never do. Without fail it's always an ad for something I already bought, which is just an annoyance - especially when you bombard me with it. Didn't anyone think to have a "has already purchased this" cookie? Would save some angst on both sides.
"peered in to see what kinds of plants you were growing and what kinds of decorations you were putting up in hopes of selling you something similar later on"
Honestly, I wouldn't mind so much if they could actually deliver on that, but they never do. Without fail it's always an ad for something I already bought, which is just an annoyance - especially when you bombard me with it. Didn't anyone think to have a "has already purchased this" cookie? Would save some angst on both sides.
joncamfield@molly0xfff this is heartwarming, and everything I miss from the earlier days of the internet.
Deborah Yoon Zacharias@molly0xfff Last night, after a long time not being able to remember, I finally recalled the name of a website that I used to frequent in the very early aughts. Blather.newdream.net. I learned that it is still going AND I rediscovered something I posted 20+ years ago (WOW)! It was an amazing place + community back then! Ppl just wanted to build stuff and share it for fun.
drmorr@molly0xfff thank you for providing a bright hopeful light in a sea of doomscrolling
Aral Balkan@molly0xfff Excellent article, thank you for writing it, Molly.
Although I do wish I didn’t feel like we didn’t exist while reading it.
This is the Small Web—what Laura & I have been specifically working to realise for the past six years at least (if not closer to a decade if you count our work on the problem before settling on one possible solution):
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
We do this as a self-funded (read; struggling) tiny not-for-profit (https://small-tech.org).
What is the Small Web?
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
Ollie Boermans@aral @molly0xfff I’m not remotely interested in the web past compared to what we can make with today’s web standards.
I have faith that community can help us bypass the AI rubble.
@ollicle The two are not mutually exclusive. With today’s web standards Google and Facebook and every other surveillance capitalist out there is helping build a global corporate panopticon. Entirely standards compliant (it helps that they’re the ones writing the standards).
Web standards are great but they do not imply any ethical framework to what is produced.
So I’m more interested in how we learn from the past to go forward differently and create a fairer and kinder world.
@aral three cheers to that!
I had more, but it read like babble.
Jenna 🇨🇦I love this so much!
When your developer tools become everyday (and every person) tools, I want to be part of the small web!
@jenna Thank you! 💕
I’m very much looking forward to they day when I can tell you that time is now :)
*gets back to writing code so that hopefully happens sooner rather than later*
Samuel@molly0xfff Very nice text!
I AM BANKSY ☕ / 🗑🔥@molly0xfff back in the day, we'd gather around a 17" CRT to watch ZOMBO.COM as a family. So wholesome.
Vesna Manojlović@molly0xfff thanks for calling it a “web” & not “Internet” ! I love the gardening analogy ! Myself, I’ve lamented this loss in 2012 & dreamed of a better future networks : decentralized, meshed, participatory, altruistic, “free”… utopian. here’s a link to that old article, still hosted on my (rented) place on the web: https://becha.home.xs4all.nl/hackers-philosophers-utopian-network-dec-2012-becha.pdf
Luka Prin/ce Lucija@becha @molly0xfff just wow both those links!!!
kwantumkraut@molly0xfff @cobweb Thanks a ton for writing / sharing, great article!
outsidecontext 🇺🇦🕊️@molly0xfff It's so good to read something with a positive and encouraging bottom line. Thanks for this article.
Lieke@molly0xfff
This metaphor of the garden works so well!
This metaphor of the garden works so well!
Jeremiah Lee@molly0xfff This was a lovely read to start my day with. Thank you for writing it!
Darryl Ramm@molly0xfff White male straight garden gnomes everywhere just happy the article is about them...
Glenn@molly0xfff I have a well-intended suggestion for online newspapers - charge a dime per for viewing the paper per day, and only a dime. So, when you get to the site, it can put up the normal paywall, but I suggest you can pay 10 cents for viewing the site for the rest of the day. The paper could provide subscriptions as well, just like they did for print, but you don't have to pay subscription amounts if you want to view a "paper" only once.
@molly0xfff Some enterprising tech bro can create the online equivalent of a sidewalk newspaper dispenser, but allow it to be used for any newspaper website that wants to use the service.
Old Fucking Punk@molly0xfff Just throttle all internet access to 9600 baud (except for the rich, of course), and we'd get the old internet back really quick.
#GoodOldDays
#GoodOldDays
acrtn@molly0xfff we are lucky to have you. Thank you for your writing
Martijn Frazer@molly0xfff It's interesting you didn't get significantly fewer responses through Mastodon compared to Twitter.
txerren 🇵🇸@molly0xfff this was maybe the best piece of text I read all day, and it has been a day of reading. Thank you! We needed this.
coyotebroad@molly0xfff I reminisced about the awesomeness of the 1990s Internet in the blog linked below. I so, so miss the community of those days. But I'm still not clear, from your article, how we get that back.
https://coyotecommunications.com/coyoteblog/2016/04/1994/
https://coyotecommunications.com/coyoteblog/2016/04/1994/
TiZed@molly0xfff In the "good old days" the Internet was slow and clunky, it was also charming and personal. People were doing things for the hack it of it, for fun, experimenting. In other words, the Internet was for people not eyeballs. When DSL rolled out there was a brief time when the Internet was actually good. Google was just a good search engine. Amazon was starting with Web Services. Facebook was a place to "poke" old friends. Then money and advertising came, along with governments psyops.
Dr Kim Foale@molly0xfff i love this piece and hope its not too forward to send you some of our research looking at how we could approach building it from a community development perspective, i.e. by starting by working with the most rather than least marginalised people designing it: https://gfsc.studio/blog/2024/community-tech-partnerships-year-1-report/
Dillo browser> Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier.
Web standards have become more complex. A handful of companies[1] (WHATWG) now control[2] the HTML5 "standard"[3], a document *so long* that I use it to benchmark the Dillo browser.
[1]:https://whatwg.org/sg-agreement#7-execution
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#W3C_and_WHATWG_conflict
[3]:https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ (warning: big)